Against Crime Fiction

Death, perhaps literature’s basic concern, … is in crime fiction made into a kind of puzzle which can be solved. Death is made safe by being looked at as something which might well not exist, if it wasn’t for a murder, and then is reduced further by making this murder, death, into a puzzle to be solved. And which will be solved. … Literature is writing so strong that one sees life as something else after meeting it. It has to do with the uniqueness in every human being, and with this truth: the most unique is the most universal. Crime fiction is the opposite, to see life as the same all the time and feel safe in one’s lie. It’s pornography of death, and much less honest than the pornography which has to do with the beginning of life.

It’s a subtle, intriguing argument, but open to easy objections: Jonathan Buckley’s So He Takes the Dog, Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, and Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country all spring to mind as obvious exceptions to Fosse’s rule. Following his full remarks at the ReadySteadyBook blog, commenters have already listed some other exceptions.